e at least
could joke have been more successful.

As I had not yet ascertained that the Old Red Sandstone of the north of
Scotland is richly fossiliferous, Conon-side and its neighbourhood
furnished me with no very favourable field for geologic exploration. It
enabled me, however, to extend my acquaintance with the great
conglomerate base of the system, which forms here, as I have already
said, a sort of miniature Highlands, extending between the valleys of
the Conon and the Peffer, and which--remarkable for its picturesque
cliffs, abrupt eminences, and narrow steep-sided dells--bears in its
centre a pretty wood-skirted loch, into which the old Celtic prophet
Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his art, buried "deep
beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was wont to see both
the distant and the future. Immediately over the pleasure-grounds of
Brahan, the rock forms exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
would make, if he could--cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
and many a sweet little flower; while far below, among the deep woods,
there stand up enormous fragments of the same rock, that must have
rolled down in some remote age from the precipices above, and which,
mossy and hoar, and many of them ivy-bound, resemble artificial
ruins--obnoxious, however, to none of the disparaging associations which
the make-believe ruin is sure always to awaken. It was inexpressibly
pleasant to spend a quiet evening hour among these wild cliffs, and
imagine a time when the far distant sea beat against their bases; but
though their enclosed pebbles evidently owed their rounded form to the
attrition of water, the imagination seemed paralyzed when it attempted
calling up a still earlier time, when these solid rocks existed as but
loose sand and pebbles, tossed by waves or scattered by currents; and
when, for hundreds and thousands of square miles, the wild tract around
existed as an ancient ocean, skirted by unknown lands. I had not yet
collected enough of geologic fact to enable me to grapple with the
difficulties of a restoration of the more ancient time. There was a
later period, also, represented in the immediate neighbourhood by a
thick deposit of stratified sand, of which I knew as little as of the
conglomerate. We dug into it, in founding a thrashing-mill